"I cannot vouch for the quality of your imagination."

"We are selfish, arrogant immortal dilettantes who have enough toys that everyone has to tolerate conduct which they'd otherwise at least have the luxury of openly calling evil?"

"I would not have used that phrase."

"I am not going to torpedo a treaty over people loathing me and if I were so inclined it's already blindingly obvious. If you have something to say -"

"You have decapitated Calado and are wearing its skin and rumor has it you are doing so over some blue scapegoat called Dakami Insho, is that right?"

"Over the healthcare, over the permissions system, over the roads, over the homeless people, and yes, over the principle that people shouldn't have the power to shoot innocents until their problems go away."

"But of course if they had chosen a different scapegoat you would instead have kidnapped Dakami Insho and she would now be on Valinor missing anything she liked about her life apart from the fact that it went on."

"Yes."

"I harbor no affection for permissions systems or corrupt healthcare budgets or privatized roads or homelessness, but a principle I am very fond of is that no one should wake up to discover that everything about the world has changed at the same time and they are subject to the whims of conquerors and bizarre moon logic. You had the leverage to do anything you wanted. Visitors to Calado can learn to navigate it; you could have done the same. You could have gone elsewhere altogether. You could have more surgically punished whoever was responsible for Dakami Insho. And instead you did that."

"Would it have been better for us to go elsewhere? We considered it. That's actually what I said to the generals - 'if you think it's wiser, we'll go to Tapa.' I think a ruling class that squanders the wealth and goodwill and lives and hopes and dreams of its citizens, constantly and casually and at no provocation, should be less of a priority than the people they've so abused. Lots of people woke up in Calado to discover that everything about the world had changed at the same time - every person arrested for nothing or executed as a scapegoat or fired with a black mark after they happened to mildly irritate a senator who enjoyed destroying them for it, everyone who thought they had a permission and learned that the person who'd offered it had been lying, a constant unbearable epidemic of lives overturned without warning or reason, more of them every season than the country has blues."

"Had I found myself in your position I would have gone elsewhere."

"They'd probably have had a coup anyway, when it became obvious their senate had bumbled its way out of space travel. I suppose my hands would have been clean of it."

"I would have fewer complaints if you had confined yourselves to attacking the Senate and had not disappeared them incommunicado to another planet."

"I was not confident in my ability to achieve anything more than revenge that way. Revenge and a hostile grieving replacement government."

"Whereas now because the other citizens of Calado have as little interest in the welfare of blues as you do they are all content to ignore it."

"It'd be a bit much to expect people to rise up on behalf of the thieves and murderers who've coerced and manipulated and impoverished them, or even on behalf of those thieves and murderers' innocent children. Concern for the welfare of one's overlords is earned, not obligatory."

"I am not particularly condemning the citizenry of Calado. I am sure they are delighted with you. You have available what they most wanted in the world and you're giving it away. They would love you if you did any number of things."

"We're not resting on that. We can give them starships, but we're working at full speed towards a world where everyone can give their people starships. That's not remotely all there is to doing right by them."

"Mm."

"Don't think we can? Or don't think it matters, if it's foreigners doing it?"

"I believe you could have made much of the progress you're inclined to be proud of incrementally."

"You might think too highly of me."

"I think that a squirrel could have done it with spaceships and patience."

" - do keep in mind that we spent a season trying that and got absurd fake foreign students and coverup executions and several occasions of security forces coming to blows in front of us over who got to be holding us hostage."

"I don't know who you were asking for help but my ambassador was never asked 'so, how do you accomplish anything in this mess of a country'."